The roles of information characteristics and accountability in moderating stereotype-driven processes during social decision making

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of stereotype availability, stereotype-consistency of attribute information, and accountability on information acquisition during social judgment. Subjects used a computer-controlled information board to request items of individuating information describing several target ratees who were either labeled with stereotypic occupation titles (e.g., librarian) or were presented with non-descriptive labels (e.g., “Person 1”). Main effects of stereotype labeling supported the prediction that decision makers would gather fewer individuating items of information about targets, and would examine the information for less time, when targets were labeled with stereotypic category membership. While a main effect of accountability indicated greater attention to attribute information overall, a three-way interaction between labeling, information consistency, and accountability indicated that stereotype inconsistencies undercut biased information seeking only when decision makers were unaccountable for their judgments. Accountable decision makers appeared to rely on available stereotypes during information acquisition, regardless of the stereotype-consistency of available target information. This suggests that accountability may induce “freezing” (Kruglanski, 1990) on early stereotype-based opinions within complex social judgment tasks. Results provided support for previous research on stereotype-driven processes during the attention stage of social perception and implicated complex motivational processes as determinants of category-based and piecemeal processing. © 1995 Academic Press. All rights reserved.